Space Cowboys and Werewolves

Happy Halloween everyone! While it seems our usual tradition of going to see movies at the Old Redford is skipping a year, I'm headed up to State tonight to reunite the BSD brain trust. I have no idea what we're doing, but it should be good.

The first clip is a nice homage to Firefly from Castle, which is a pretty good show. Nothing groundbreaking, but enjoyable none the less.



And, what is probably the greatest Halloween song ever.

Greatest Halloween Songs

Halloween is almost upon us, and you all know what that means... yes, hearing Monster Mash until your ears bleed. While, I won't deny that I enjoyed the song as a kid, and that it is catchy, I've had my fill of Monster Mash for this lifetime. So, we here at BSD have attempted to compile a few song to replace it. The first seven songs were picked by me, the last eight by Caleb...

I Put a Spell on You by CCR
Why it rocks: While not really all that relevant to the topic, I'll admit... it does talk about magic. The real reason this is on the list is because of the pounding, incessant music and the growling cries of Foggerty.
Scariest/creepiest line:
I put a spell on you, because you're mine.

Witchy Woman by the Eagles
Why it rocks: Sure, it's an obvious pick, and not one of my favorite Eagles song, but you can't deny that it fits here. The music is wailing enough to be creepy, and while the lyrics seem a bit contrived at times, there are some nice lines.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Crazy laughter in another room
And she drove herself to madness with a silver spoon.

Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin
Why it rocks: Perhaps overplayed to the point of having lost all meaning for most people, it was always one of my favorite songs growing up. The music in undeniably creepy and sad, the theme of death permeates the entire song.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Your head is humming and it won't go,
In case you don't know,
The piper's calling you to join him

Banshee Song by Gob
Why it rocks: Well... it's about a Banshee, and love... or something. I'm sure that's a metaphor for something, but... Banshees! Another very creepy melody and obviously Halloweeny lyrics.
Scariest/creepiest line:
I am every waiting
You are out there wailing

Mr. Crowley by Ozzy Osbourne
Why it rocks: Organ music, lyrics about the craziest motherfucker in Victorian England, and Ozzy Osbourne... can't get much scarier than that. I'd like to see Ozzy sing this to Alistair Crowley's corpse... that would make a damn good concert, actually.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head,
Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead.

Lady in Black by Uriah Heep
Why it rocks: Solemn, but with a nice beat. The lyrics are almost spit out and the refrain is replaced simply by a moaning wail by the only band (that I know of) named after a Dickens character.
Scariest/creepiest line:
And I begged her give me horses to trample down my enemy,
So eager was my passion to devour this waste of life.

Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon
Why it rocks: Without a doubt my favorite Halloween song. It's oddly upbeat for the subject matter, but the music has just a tinge of creepiness to mitigate that fact. Quirky, fun and violent, what is more Halloweeny than that? Ahoooooooooo!
Scariest/creepiest line:
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking down the streets of Soho in the rain.

Ice Cream Man by Tom Waits
Why it rocks: The sheer eeriness of this song gets me every time. The twang of the bells and the melodic chimes in the song’s opening are hypnotizing and the melodic sexual innuendos in the lyrics are a virtual Pied Piper’s pixie song of Humbert Humbert or Pennywise.
Scariest/creepiest line:
I got a cherry Popsicle right on time
A big stick, mamma, that'll blow your mind

I Hear the Rain by the Violent Femmes
Why it rocks: A slightly quicker (and slightly creepier) funeral dirge than we’re used to.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Burry me out on a lone prairie.
Friendly calls of the coyote.

Thriller by Michael Jackson
Why it rocks: Three of the greatest words in horror cinema: Vincent Price voiceover. Price did for terror what John Waters did for homosexuality in a way Hitchcock and Castle could only dream of.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize your neighborhood.

Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus
Why it rocks: Tragic and romantic, just like Dracula, just like Lugosi.  
Scariest/creepiest line:
The count,
Bela Lugosi’s‘s dead,
Undead undead undead.

Hybrid Moments by The Misfits
Why it rocks: It wasn't easy choosing just one Halloweeny non-Halloween song by the Misfits- there are too many to choose from. Hybrid Moments captures the feeling of fleeting fun which Halloween carries with it the older I get.  
Scariest/creepiest line:
If you’re gonna scream, scream with me.

Weird Scene by Mr. Brown
Why it rocks: For a very long time I had no idea what this song was. I heard it on Little Steven’s Underground Garage while driving to Grand Rapids, MI on Halloween in 2006. It has since become one of my favorite songs and supplement to Ray Bradbury’s classic Halloween short story The Homecoming.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Uncle Billy’s always locked away inside the shed
He’s got these little marks along the right side of his head
Says he got them swimming with the dolphins in the sea
He is the favorite uncle of the weirdest family.

Discover Mr Brown!

Goosebumps Theme
Why it rocks: This song still sends a shiver down my spine. When I was young this show scared me more than the X-Files did because it could keep my attention, was fully comprehendible, and this song. The strings are like knives and the piano is like the forest in Hansel and Gretel.
Scariest/creepiest line:
Viewer beware, you’re in for a scare.

Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner
Why it rocks: This song is a Halloween hold over from my parents.  I'm used to when hearing this song being told about how for the first few Halloweens my parents lived together they would set up speakers on the windowsill of there flat and play it all day long until trick-or-treating was over or the church down the street from them asked that it be turned off.
Scariest/creepiest line:
“All that listening to Wagner makes me wants to invade Poland”
~ Oscar Wilde on Wagner

by Matt&Caleb

Graveyards

When I was born my family lived across the street from a graveyard. There was our house, a brown brick Tudor building with a high isosceles roof and lead set windows. Then the black flattop of the street dividing us from St. Alphonsus church with its roof twice as high and slender as ours and stained panes of glass and flat steps in front of a shallow church yard. And then there was the graveyard full of faded and new tombstones and great big carvings of christ in the midst of his crucifixion.

There were days when my brother and I would play between the stones and others when we would slink past them to the corner store. And other times when I'd go there by myself, crossing the street and squeezing through the fence to wander dumbfounded to the far side of the yard like wading out into the deep end of swimming pool. I'd pick up pieces of trash or crunch dry leaves and grass in my little hands before rushing home again, too scared to stay too long, evading any horrible thoughts I could like trying to escape a Band-Aid caught in my wake.

Before I knew what a calendar was I was easy pray for Friday the 13th tricks by my brother. It didn't matter that I didn't know who Jason was, or what a Friday or a 13 was- I understood bad luck and fright as well as anyone did. When I got older my mother's stories about how at the 'old house' (that house) ouija boards would never work right and tarot readings always seemed congested only fueled my fearful memories. Memories which even today, when graveyards do little to scare or thrill me, are made electric again with the static rustle of Halloween over the street drains.

A feeling I also got when reading the first few pages of Neil Gaiman’s new work The Graveyard Book as I leafed through it at the bookstore the other day. It's a delightful collection of stories (8 to be precise) which together tell the story of Nobody Owens, a child raised by ghosts. As Gaiman describes the thing it's The Jungle Book, with ghosts instead of animals and graves rather than trees.


All and all it's a enjoyable book intended for young readers but accessible by anyone but what I've been enjoying most about the book is the continued coolness it's booktour is allowing Gaiman to cultivate. Over the summer I read Gaiman's first true novel, American Gods, after hearing he had released the full text onto the internet free of charge. I loved the book but even more I think I enjoyed what Gaiman had accomplished- he grew his readership. Months after releasing the book on the web Gaiman's book sales saw huge growth. But what is even more impressive than that is that Gaiman recognized what many good authors today have also seen, that even though the author owns the copyright it's the readers who own the book. And the more interactive and giving an author can be the more receptive and gracious their readership will become.

With The Graveyard Book Gaiman decided to deal with the graciousness of his readers before the demand for him flooded his readings and elongated his signings. Instead of releasing The Graveyard Book online as he did before with American Gods, Gaiman did what with a book like this could be considered one better.  He read it aloud.  In nine nights at nine different book readings Gaiman read through his book, each night linking a video of the reading on his website for anyone to enjoy.  And, with a children's story like The Graveyard Book it's hard not to enjoy having it read to you the way so many other books had been so long ago. 

I recommend you take a look through the book if you get the chance, if only to experience the great artwork of Dave McKean.  McKean also did the artwork for another Halloween book, a personal favorite of mine, by a favorite of BSD's- Ray Bradbury's The Homecoming.  The Homecoming is another amazing autumnal story perfect for Halloween time.

You can find Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book here. If you have the time it is an easy and fun listen, especially this time of year. Happy Halloween everybody.

CML

Diana Arbus' Masked Woman in a Wheelchair PA, 1970

"A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall...."
~ T.S Eliot

Halloween, Part two

...continued...
When I was in middle and elementary school I’d trick or treat with Sean Anderson and my older brother would go out with his older brother, Bret. Sean and I were really good friends for a long time. Through kindergarten and most of elementary school Sean and his brother would come over for Halloween. We’d spend the whole afternoon running around the backyard, digging through the basement and pulling up weird toys and play weapons to bash around with. Just as it would start to get dark Sean and I would pull out a bin of old clothes, torn up shirts and knotted neck ties, old blue jeans with paint and fake blood smeared all over them. I never really knew what we were those Halloweens; sometimes zombies, sometimes scientists, sometimes just accident victims. I’d plan and plan for weeks what I was going to be each year for that one night and yet somehow it was easy enough to in just a few moments of drastic searching to transform Sean and myself from too laughing kids into two incredibly amused laughing faces of death. Every year something strange seemed to happen to Sean and I. Like one year, when we were invited into some old woman’s house and introduced to her comatose husband and like he was still all there, or when we thought we saw a UFO, or a T-Rex, or a woman with out a jaw, or when Sean got hit in the head so hard we thought he had a tumor, or the someone pointed out that Sean was black and didn’t live in our neighbor hood. I don’t know what we found more insulting that year, that someone would say something like that to two kids, or that after they did they gave us both apples instead of candy.

In my last year of high school I spent the Friday night before Halloween with those who at the time were the three people closest to me. Though they didn’t know it, or one another yet, to me they were the better part of every Friday night I’d had or would have for a long time in one way or another. I don’t really know how to write about this. Maybe if I put everything in context and added in all the details it’d make sense. But it isn’t that easy. It wasn’t just any other Friday night spent in a movie house; it wasn’t just a triple feature, it wasn’t just the week before what would be my last real Halloween. It was a lot more than all that. It was three really bad movies, with awful stories and flying fireballs. It was a headless lion tamer, a woman on roller skates, and eleven other orange ghosts. That night skeletons danced from the rafters, plot holes were left empty and Denmark became a mysterious island full of transvestite and murderers. Also though, that night was the first night I’d sleep next to a woman I loved. From that evening two things became very clear to me; firstly, that I was in love, and they loved me too, something as scary and exciting as any Halloween or murderous she-male. And secondly, that at that time I was friends with those choice few who I knew then and know now will be my friends for the rest of my life.

Two relationships began that October night, but only one lasted… As for the other, well, I guess love is much like Denmark, and we’re likely never to know exactly what happens there…

That same year, the first year I didn’t carve a pumpkin for Halloween, was the last year I went trick or treating. I’d bought a pumpkin- I just never got around to carving the damn thing. I did everything late that year. It wasn’t until the doorbell was ringing once every minute that I realized I needed to be out there too, running up and down the streets, shouting and laughing and getting louder and louder with every lost neon-orange-scattered-sunray. So I called my oldest friend, and Joshua came right over.

We were in prime trick or treating conditions, strong walking legs with upper bodies able enough to carry our knotted and wet pillow cases. Between us we would take turns wearing a football helmet, one of us an out of season coach and the other a bench warmer… Or something like that. We weren’t really that into it. We were more into the conversation mauling about between us as we trudged through the trenches of brittle leaves pilled high on either side of the street. Yes, maybe we were too old to be trick or treating, but we didn’t care. We didn’t much care for anything that year. We were seniors, we were old friends, we were tired, and it was kinda just nice to once again be with someone who was always there, someone who grew up fearing the same things as me, the same movies and monsters and classes and choices. Joshua and I had become friends under a willow tree looking through a toy magazine that was like porno to the two of us. Under that tree we wondered over art and star wars and miniature women. Growing older Joshua and I would stay friends. Throughout middle school we’d spend Friday nights at one another’s home. His dad would always rent two classics horror flicks for us and we’d pop in the VHS’ as soon as it got dark. The movies weren’t that scary by any current standards but we didn’t know that. That’s when I first watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and it’s the night I remember best. If we weren’t scared by the movies we would let ourselves get scared, make ourselves fear the glowing puppets and masks, fall into the hoax before us and roll in terror at our own jokes and horror stories. I learned what fear was with Joshua, what being scared and being a monster meant, and how one quite often lead to the next. When we got older things would change, and the glowing silver grey TV screen would turn brighter, more colorful, wavy with pause lines as we hesitated in the still silence of three o’clock, waiting, hoping no one else was awake besides us as be watched and rewatched over and over again the three second sex scenes in The Black Robe or Little Big Man. And even in that stillness I learned more about fear and waiting and excitement than I had ever before without Joshua. Years later in a haggard little Parisian motel room Josh and I would lie awake, too scared to use the bathroom in the early morning, talking back and forth between our cots as an old man walked up and down the hall, crossing-and-recrossing past our door. I reached up and scratched my nails hard against the cold rough wall and the noise was so chilling that I even scared myself with it; lost myself in the gag. I wasn’t just scaring Joshua, I was once again scaring myself with him; that moment, in that small room, my own nails imitating an old fiends dry grasp, Joshua’s breath in sync with mine, I was terrified and excited all at once as I hadn’t been since childhood. I had never felt closer to any other human being than I did at that moment to my oldest friend, Joshua Saganski.


...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghost

Halloween, Part one

When I was young, very young, I dressed up as Superman for every Halloween. Understand though that when I saw “ young” I mean before Superman suits had fake muscle chest, but also before I had memories. When I was young and all of my thoughts were framed through my father's camera and slid projector I dressed as Superman for Halloween. I do have one genuinely honest memory from those Halloweens though, I remember my mother knelling down in front of me and pulling my curl down over my forehead, just like Superman’s.

We were in the hallway of our old house, at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the long rug that ran between the bathroom and the playroom. The bathroom shone a glorious white. White lighting, and yellow light bulbs and white, slick, smooth, cold porcelain tiles glared out of the bathroom and into the halls and out all the windows of the house. I doubt it was late enough at night for it to be dark out, even for a night in late October, but in my memories it was pitch black outside.

After years of being the man of steel my curl would evolve, transform me, straighten and lengthen itself, pressed down to my forehead with my brothers hair gel, a tight widows peak, an orange devilock draping down my little Halloween melon head. For many years I put on a new cape, black and red replacing gold and blue, that I tied tight around by throat, damp with sweat and rain all October. For a month I lived as a little Dracula child, hiding under beds and behind trees, falling end over end into piles of leaves, stealing away with lengths of rope to hang bodies from trees and build giant spider’s webs. Halloween would transform me too, evolve me, turn me into little beasts, raise me from the dead, turn my face whiter and my blood redder, and let me walk out at night, set lose, a full fledge vampire sucking down sugar and ready to eat the black out of the sky, to unhang the moon and drop it in my pillow case like some treat I’d claimed as mine that night.

For a long time I spent Halloween with my best friend, my brother, Jake. Jake was my best friend from one Halloween to the next, not because he was my brother, or because for years he was the only other person in life I knew besides my parents, but because he was exciting. Jake was what Halloween was supposed to be: trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Once in a psychology class someone asked me where I learned what it meant to be a boy from and my first thought was that no one has ever taught me more about getting into trouble than my brother, the kid who taught me what it was to be a boy growing up, who through torture and demonstration showed me how to hurt people, hide things, steal junk, dig holes and run from anyone. My older brother Jake showed me not only how to be a monster on Halloween, but how to be a terror every other day of the year too.



...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghoul

Happy Halloween

Please expect a string of Halloween posts in the near future. I can make this promise because last Saturday night I was lucky enough to see The Creature From the Black Lagoon (in 3d). In order to even more so reassure this fact, Matt and Wynston were both there, and I could never ask for better muses of absurdity.

Tonight, however, I will celebrate Halloween in my own way by reading Ray Bradbury’s classic short story The Homecoming. It is amazing. I shit you not. This book smells like pumpkins, tastes like taffy, and from the first bite you can feel the razor blade in it. I'll also be listening to The Misfits. I recommend this exercise to anyone out there who feels to old to trick or treat, or just too far away from home for anything to feel right.
Halloween isn't like your birthday, it isn't depressing if you don;t do anything on Halloween, but it should be. Halloween is about getting into trouble, about stirring it up and bubbling over, and if there is any bit of little kid left in you, if you're anything like the fine people here at BSD, you can respect where I am coming from.
Happy Halloween readers and ghouls.

In the spirit of Halloween I’m dropping here a little treat from the one and only Tracy Morgan: Werewolf Bar Mitzvah


CL, spook